In an effort to foil crackers attempts to cover their tracks by altering text-based syslogs, as well as improve the syslog process as a whole, two Red Hat developers are proposing a new binary-based tool called The Journal that could replace the syslog daemon in as early as the Fedora 17 release.
And believe you me, some people are less than enthused by the proposed solution.

Developers Lennart Poettering and Kay Sievers are proposing that the current 30-year-old syslog system is inefficient and too easy to misread and hack to properly perform even its most basic function: store a log of system events on a given Linux box.